Justin Stone and the Iris of the Madonna

[joegoda]

"If you say so, Justin." Jonathan walked over to where his friend stood, and looked down at the park and the children playing on the freshly fallen snow. "Frankly, any day when my eyes open is a good day." His eyebrows knitted together. "You know, I'm thinking of a way to heat the park... you know... so there'd always be green grass for the kids to play on." His eyes rolled up to look at the top of his head. "It wouldn't be that hard, Justin."

Justin stone laughed, a soft bubbling sound that made the other man smile.

"What's so funny?" Jonathan asked.

Justin clapped his friend on the shoulder and shook him gently, as if he was a martini shaker. "You know, Rat, there are just some things which are perfect just the way they are." He raised his cane and pointed down at the figures in Stone Park. "Look at them, Jonathan. I mean, really look at them. See how happy they are?"

And indeed, there were sounds of joy rising up from the park. Children laughing or crying out in mock snow battle. There were families as well, and the parents would sit on the park's iron benches and snuggle, watching their children make snow angels on the ground or building a fort that wouldn't hold the next attack of the sun.

"Now," Justin continued, "if you were to heat the park, what would happen to all the snow? It would melt and you wouldn't hear the happy laughter of children. You'd hear the grumbles of pedestrians, slogging through the much that the snow melt caused." He shook his head, still smiling. "Not exactly the sound I want to hear. I like happy sounds, don't you?"

"Well, sure I do." Jon ran his hand through his mass of rusty curls. "But still... I remember what it was like to be out in the cold. That wasn't a happy time." He turned his blue eyes up to look at his friend, who nodded in agreement.

"I know, Jon. But that was twenty years ago, and you haven't had a cold day since." Justin pursed his lips in thought, and then, "I think that's why I keep you around. To remind me, and quite vocally and quite often, I might say, that there are others much less fortunate than I."

The two stood for a while, quietly looking down at the world from on high. Jonathan ran an absent hand through the curls of his beard.

"Then maybe just heating the benches," he muttered to himself. "Not too much, mind."

Justin just laughed. Taking his black top hat off and spreading his arms wide, he pirouetted there on the roof of the Stone Tower.

"I like this new building!" he exclaimed.

"Hell," answered Jonathan, "I'm still moving my stuff in from the old place. It'll take months to get to the point where I can find anything." He huffed a white cloud out into the air. "I still think we were doing fine at the old place."

"Oh, we were," Justin said. "I just felt that it was time to get our own place. It's one thing to have a spot that works fine and dandy but owned by someone else, and quite the other to have your own spot." He crossed back to the low marble wall surrounding the roof. "Besides, doesn't this have a dandy view?" He indicated the skyline and the surrounding area. "You can't say we had this when we were stuck in that moldy basement."

"Moldy Basement?" Jonathan exclaimed, puffing his cheeks in and out, like an angry garden gnome. He wasn't truly angry, but this was an old argument the two of them had played out many times. "That 'moldy basement' housed some of the finest scientific equipment available! If there was a spot of mold anywhere, it was because it was there on purpose."

The original Stone Foundation was set up in the basement of Mother of Mercy hospital, a non-profit hospital that catered to the underprivileged and needy. It was non-profit mainly because of a sizable donation made by, of course, Stone Shipping.

Granted, it takes a lot of money to run a hospital of any size, and not all of it came from Stone Shipping. There were other contributors as well and the hospital was very grateful to have Justin step up and offer to be the spokesperson for Mother of Mercy when it came time for its numerous charity drives and auctions. With his natural charm and charisma, Justin was more than able to drive the hospital's coffers to overflowing.

In fact, Mother of Mercy was very grateful to their benefactor, and so when Justin asked for a small space in which to do research, both medical and scientific, the naturally agreed. He had asked for just a few small offices, but the hospital went him one better. They offered him the use of the entire basement. Their reasoning was that the basement was used for nothing more than storage, so it would not be that much trouble to provide Justin with the space he requested.

Jonathan was ecstatic. The basement was simply for storage. It also contained an enormous steam power generating plant. He had begun to work on several ideas that would require copious amounts of power and the steam plant was just the thing.

Over the next three years, the Stone Foundation set up three scholarship funds, one each for sciences, engineering and medicine. One of the many long discussions that Justin and Jonathan had involved the creation of a think-tank. A place where minds could work together and create a brave new world. In order to do that, they would need the sort of minds that could work together, and those minds need a diverse set of disciplines.

And those minds did come to them, eventually. The basement grew cramped as the Stone foundation expanded their experiments into the realm of radio, transportation, medicines and exploration.

At the end of the three years, there were over four hundred patents pending for any number of devices. Many were a matter of taking something to the next logical step, such as a more efficient toaster or washing machine, and some were far beyond what had been thought of before, such as the electromotive Monorail.

The Monorail was built the same year as the Stone Tower, in 1882, and now ran as public transportation across the city. It was an idea that Justin had presented to Jonathan, as many of the inventions were. San Francisco had implemented a cable car system in 1873. Justin had wondered aloud if it were possible to do the same in their city, but without cables.

Jonathan had simply hummed at the idea, rolled his eyes up and his brows down and had disappeared into his office for a few hours. Later that day, he called a few of the Stone interns in to discuss the idea. Three days later, a full blown conceptual diagram had appeared on Justin's desk.

Justin looked at the diagram and smiled. He then picked up the telephone on his desk and called the Mayor. While he waiting for the operator to connect him, he looked up at Jonathan and said, "I had no doubt."

Six months later the first three mile stretch of monorail connected the Bay with Downtown. A year later and there was more than twenty six miles of air born and underground track, taking passengers from here to there, faster than a horse, safer than a locomotive, and all for the price of a single nickel.

It was the whole idea of the Monorail that had convinced Justin to move out of the Mother of Mercy basement and build a building of their own. "We're going to big, little brother," he said. "We'll out grow this place in no time."

And so it came to pass. In many ways, most of the modern conveniences of the late 1880's were due to the inventiveness and sheer genius of the two men and the Stone Foundation. Of course, they would say that they had simply built on the shoulders of giants. Before them lay the work of Pasteur, of Da Vinci, of Michael Faraday and many others.

Justin would flash his crowd pleasing smile and simply wave all the praise away, saying, "There are so many others whose work we have borrowed from... or stolen from." The statement, true or not, never failed to get a laugh from the assembled audience.

If success breeds anything other than more success, Justin and Jonathan found it. After so much going absolutely right, they decided to turn it all over to those minds that were really running the show, and they would get back to doing what it was they wished to do. And that was why there was a party tonight, on November 16th 1884. Justin Stone and Jonathan Ratzenmueller were going to announce their retirement at the grand old age of 32.

And that is where the real story begins.